He bared that half smile I’d seen before. “That gun’s a special one,” he said, venturing a step forward. “I told your aunt not to keep it, but she’s always been a sentimental littlerat.”
He spat the last word with a laugh, as if it were a joke I was supposed to understand.
“Get back.” My finger found the trigger, cold and smooth. “I’ll shoot.”
Mr. Zhou called my bluff. He dared another step, speaking amiably. “She owes me money. A great deal of money. I did your uncle a favor during the war, you see. Since she’s been remiss in paying me back, I am entitled to take something else. I thought about that maid”—he didn’t even glance at Tingting—“but now you’ve intrigued me.” His tone dripped with a brightand unsettling zeal. “Little devil, does anyone else know what you can do?”
I shivered. I should have disappeared right then and there—or fired the gun. Life would have been very different if I had.
He was fast. In two steps, he obliterated the distance between us. He shoved me against the wall and wrested the gun out of my hand. As it landed on the carpet with a thud, I caught a flash of gold—the rings on his fingers. My only warning before he punched me in the face.
I threw myself to the side. Metal bit my skin, Mr. Zhou’s knuckles ripping into the cartilage and flesh of my left ear.
A scream tore out of my throat. I lay curled up on the floor waiting for the next blow to come, trying to breathe through the searing rush of pain to my head but also not to breathe so I could turn invisible. The parlor was swaying, the corners of the room constricting into an impossible contortion.
Mr. Zhou loomed over me and yanked me up by my hair.No!I twisted away. I sucked in a mouthful of air, about to make myself disappear—
When the blast of a gunshot came.
It sounded near yet far away—my ears were in warring disagreement. It didn’t matter. All of a sudden I was seven years old again. I dropped to my stomach and pressed my face to Sai Ma’s carpet as if it were the grass of Tunglam’s hills.
I didn’t know how long I lay there choking on the peppery tang of gunpowder and cupping my ear in agony.
Ying.I couldn’t tell whether the voice was real or only imagined. It swam inside me, resonating off my bones as if I were underwater.
“Ying!”
Someone was shaking me. I looked up. Yi Gor was bent over my face, and there was blood on his fingers when he touched my cheek.
His mouth was moving, uttering words I could not hear over the throbbing in my skull.
I mustered a smile for my brother. Then I gave into the pain and let myself drift, the edges of my vision growing dark and darker—until I found another way to disappear from this world.
I’d never know whether the hearing in my left ear could have been saved, for Gu Ma refused to take me to a doctor. At the time, I didn’t care. I was about to lose something far more precious.
Two nights after Zhou Hin Kong came to collect his debts, my brother stood at the threshold of my room. It was late, the moon a silvery thread above the surrounding hills, and he carried a scruffy leather suitcase, the same one he had arrived with.
I jolted up on my bed. The movement sent a stab of heat to my ear, and I noted the pool of dried blood on my pillow.
“Where are you going?” I rasped.
“I’m leaving for Malaya.”
“Now?” I swayed, lightheaded from the numbing medicines Sai Ma had fed me. “Because of Zhou Hin—”
“Don’t ever mention that piece of shit again,” interrupted Yi Gor. “Never, do you hear me?”
In my daze, I thought he was asking me literally, so I tapped my left ear. The sound was quieter than it should have been, and blurred with the whir of the aircon upstairs. More disorienting than painful, which I supposed was a good sign. So yes, I could hear him. I just chose not to.
“Did you kill him?”
At the question, the anger drained from my brother’s face. “I pulled the trigger.”
My chest clenched. No wonder he looked awful. No wonder Gu Ma had hung charms over my bed and in the hall forexpelling ghosts and evil spirits. My brother had killed a man. Thanks to him, the only person who’d known my secret—besides Mama—was dead. Was it so horrible that I felt more relief than anything else?
“Are you running away from the police?”
“There’s no need. Gu Ma’s taken care of everything. It never happened.”
